With many groups trying to cut expenses, it’s worth taking a look at how to get the most bang for your buck when it comes to printing. Printed auction materials tend to consume a large part of a budget, so here are some benefit auction ideas on to splurge and when to save.
Auction Invitation: WORTH IT, depending on ticket price
The formal printed invitation has not yet been made obsolete by the “evite,” and many guests will expect to receive their copy in the mail (especially if you have a more expensive ticket price).
But make sure to have an electronic version handy, especially for corporate donors who increasingly do business by email only. This will help to cut down the number of invitations that have to be printed and mailed, saving you postage costs, which is also pricey.
Dinner Program: WORTH IT, in a ‘lite’ version
If a guest is enjoying themselves at an event, they won’t reada lengthy program cover-to-cover. Very few guests do.
You can cut unnecessary narrative and letters and stick to the items guests need to know that night, such as the order of the evening, the menu (some guests have allergies), and a description of live auction items.
Auction Catalog: NOT WORTH IT, UNLESS …you’re distributing these in advance
Save your pennies and don’t print catalogs, unless you’re getting these in guests’ hands prior to the auction.
When a full-length auction catalog is distributed at the event, your guests won’t read it until the event is over. That doesn’t help your bottom line.
Save the Date: PROBABLY NOT WORTH IT
For most organizations, a save the date card is redundant information since the date is usually announced in a newsletter, brochure, or other mailing already sent to patrons. If it is necessary, consider an email blast instead. (You do collect emails … right?)
Auction Signage: WORTH IT
Anything that clearly directs guests to the auction items they want to bid on will always be worth the money.
Large signs clearly marking each section and easy-to-ready display signs are essential. Another option is to display or distribute maps of the silent auction layout. One of my clients went so far as to color code each section on the map to match the bid sheets, table cloths and signs, making each section instantly identifiable.
Pinch your pennies on the printing and you’ll have more money to devote to other aspects of the auction which will return a stronger ROI (return-on-investment) for you.
I was just reviewing the printing expenses for the auction we held on Saturday, when this came over the transom.
My take:
Save the date cards – I used these long before the invitations were available and distributed them almost like business cards.
Our newsletter comes out only twice a year, and quite a bit before the actual event. And we do collect email addresses, but it’s by no means even close to a complete list. We also have an older donor base who are not 100% comfortable with doing things on-line. So your suggestions for substitutes don’t quite work for us.
We slimmed down this year from a full catalog to a dinner program with menu, live auction items, sponsor names and logos, a list of silent auction donors, and thank yous. This was well worth it. We had all auction items available as a simple list on line if people were interested. This on-line list warned that some items might be combined with others, or might not appear the night of, just so potential buyers wouldn’t be unhappy. The list was generated from an excel sheet we were keeping anyway, semi-automatically to the website.
As to Sara’s observation – if you have all your auction info in a database, or even if you’re like us and it’s in a zillion excel spreadsheets – printing out the information that would have been in a catalog should be easy-peasy, and doesn’t require the cost of producing a booklet with a four-color, cardstocky cover. And the electronic information is much easier to search and sort.
But the invitation…this was our most expensive printing job, and cost the most in postage. There’s the invitation (on card stock), the envelope and the inner envelope, and the RSVP card – and the additional postage for all that extra weight. Ai yi yi!
It’s hard for me to know how many people came specifically because they got a dead-tree thing in the mail. We probably got more tickets paid for via check (saving us credit card fees) than if the whole thing were on-line).
A similar organization to ours said that out of 5000 invitations mailed to their fundraising lunch, FIVE came back with checks buying tickets. Everyone else came because they were invited by a table captain. Their conclusion: if an organization really gets people in through your table captains, maybe just a few printed invitations that could be handed out by the table captains, and not 5000 mailed, would be the way to go.
Us? The jury’s still out. I suspect we’ll still be printing and mailing out invitations next year.
These are interesting observations. As someone who has volunteered on events before, I feel that printed auction books ARE worth it for the long term — it’s so helpful to have a printed auction book and other printed items from the night of the event, to look back on for reference in future years. I think if event planners are dropping the printing of save-the-date cards and auction booklets, they need to be sure to have SOME hard-copy, easy-to-review version to share with board members and volunteers and staff in future years, when planning for the next event begins anew.
Thanks for sharing, Sara. And to your point, I’d recommend doing a review of the event and using that instead. If the catalogs are truly just listing item descriptions and not being used for advertising or other “sales opportunities,” they won’t pay for themselves. Better to just have a thoroughly written review (the “hard copy,” you call it) of the event and leaving that for future teams to review.